소개
In the darkest days for value investors, early 2000, Rich Pzena nearly sold the money-management firm he’d started four years earlier. As tech stocks went to the moon, his relative performance was abysmal and investors were walking. “I can’t tell you how many times I heard ‘You just don’t get it,’” he says.
Pzena held firm, with stellar results. Pzena Investment Management now manages $11 billion in institutional, individual and mutual fund assets. Through February 18, his mutual fund, the John Hancock Classic Value Fund, is up 20.4% annually over the past five years, making it the #1 domestic large-cap fund tracked by Morningstar.
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Only 21 and armed with a Wharton MBA in 1980, Rich Pzena did as many of the best and brightest did then, seeking his fortune in the booming energy industry. “Energy was about
32% of the S&P 500, and I still have the 1980 Amoco oil price forecast projecting
$200 a barrel by the year 2000,” he recalls. He left Amoco in 1986 to become an oil-industry analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein, and was hooked on the world of investing. He started his own firm in 1995. The perspective gained from riding out the energy boom and bust serves him well to this day as an investor. “One of those great lessons in life,” he says.
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Start us off by describing your investing strategy and process.
RP: The philosophy is old-fashioned value: Try to find good businesses when they go on sale. That’s it. How do we define what’s value? We’re looking to buy basically when we can satisfy five criteria: First, the price is low relative to the company’s “normal” earnings.
Normal is what should this business earn given a variety of factors -- its history, the industry structure in which it competes, competitor margins, its individual company strengths and weaknesses, its management and its business plan. While the screening process we go through is scientific, obviously [our estimate of normal
earnings] is not a scientific number.
Second, we look for current earnings that are below normal. Typically, in the companies we’re buying the margins have fallen below their historic norms. That’s important to us – we avoid companies that are doing better than usual, which makes us really skeptical.
Does it matter why performance is below historic norms?
RP: Of course, but the primary question is whether you can convince yourself that the situation is temporary and can reverse itself. Take Boeing, which was our largest holding last year. The prior time we bought Boeing was because the company had screwed up. The market was healthy, but they didn’t execute. By the way, in general, we appreciate it when management screws up, because that gives us an opportunity to buy. More recently though, it wasn’t a company screw-up [that lead to Boeing’s performance shortfall] – it’s that people just stopped buying airplanes. Whatever the reason, I don’t care. I’ll invest if I believe the situation is not permanent.
So we seek out businesses that are at a low valuation and under-earning. That way you have two ways to win: One is improved valuation and the other is an earnings rebound -- and growth rates can be enormous as you’re coming off a depressed level to a more normal level.
The third thing we’re looking for is whether management’s plan to restore their business back to historic norms is a sensible plan, and whether they can execute it. That is pure judgment. All you’re doing is gathering information on industry conditions and then you’re listening to what they say. Does it make sense? What does the track record say?
Including an analysis of whether the competitive environment has simply changed?
RP: Correct. If that’s the case and management’s plan doesn’t make sense, then we don’t buy. Of course, we don’t know if the plan is going to work, so we have to consider the case where the plan fails.
Our fourth and fifth criteria point to that. The fourth is to ask whether the business is a good
business. To us, the definition of a good business is if you can specifically identify reasons why it should be able to earn a return in excess of its [cost of] capital. It could be anything: a competitive cost position, a franchise brand, an installed base of business, unique technology – some reason to believe that even if the current management fails to restore earnings, somebody else would want to try.
Say, an acquirer of the assets. Or the board replacing management with other management. Or even the same management trying another plan, because it’s worth trying and you can specifically understand why it’s worth trying.
The fifth point is that we need downside protection. We don’t want to lose a lot of money if we’re wrong. That protection generally comes in one of two forms: in the company’s physical assets, or in the established revenue franchise of the business. For example, if you were going to look at Whirlpool, the physical assets of the company are probably not
worth a lot. What is worth a lot is the Whirlpool brand. So we’d say if this management team screwed up, somebody else would want to buy the valuable piece
of property of the Whirlpool brand. So even if we were wrong on our earnings expectations, we probably wouldn’t get killed.
Our metrics typically are that we can envision losses of no more than 25% in any of the companies we own. And we expect upside significantly above that, giving us a more favorable risk/reward outcome.
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